How CFOs Can Use AI to Increase Performance

Gaining an Understanding of Subjects You Know Nothing About 

CFOs often need to get up to speed quickly on complex topics—whether it’s a new financial regulation, a disruptive technology, or an emerging market trend. And you are often expected to be fairly knowledgeable about a vast array of topics. You want to at least have a cursory understanding of major topics that are in the news and impacting your industry. Traditionally, this would require hours of reading or consulting experts. AI can fast-track that process. 

Tools like ChatGPT or Jasper are perfect for breaking down complex topics. You can simply ask AI to summarize something such as captive insurance companies and let it go to work. These tools can scan entire databases and then provide you with a simplified explanation of the subject. No need to wade through dense financial literature anymore. AI will synthesize the information and give you a quick grasp of the essentials. 

It can also give you other resources to check if you want to know more. You can also ask it questions about particular areas of the subject to clarify your understanding. We here at CFO Confidential have done this on multiple topics a day. It really is a game changer. 

For example, one of our friends who is the CFO at a mid-sized tech company used ChatGPT to quickly learn about the intricacies of blockchain technology before a board meeting, helping her speak confidently about the technology’s impact on supply chain operations. 

Putting Together Draft Responses to Sensitive Emails 

As CFO, you’re constantly dealing with sensitive emails. Whether it's responding to a frustrated vendor, an internal dispute, or questions from a bank. 

Putting together just the right response to these communications can be time-consuming. AI, however, can help you write these responses faster and smarter. If you’re like us, having a draft response to modify is much easier than writing something from scratch. 

With AI-powered email tools like Grammarly's tone detection, you can quickly put together professional, carefully worded drafts. The AI can help adjust the tone based on the situation—apologetic, assertive, or neutral. Just tell it what you want. Keep asking it for as many changes as you want until you have something that is workable. 

The AI-generated draft can serve as a solid foundation for you to personalize before sending. 

This allows you to focus on the content, not the mechanics of drafting, saving you valuable time without sacrificing precision. 

Review of Contracts 

Contract review is often a painstaking process for CFOs, but it’s also critical to mitigating risk. AI can greatly accelerate contract reviews by automatically scanning documents for key terms, compliance clauses, and financial risks. 

Tools like LawGeex or Kira Systems can identify unusual clauses or terms that may require closer scrutiny. 

You can also tell it specific areas of concern that you want checked. Want to confirm the insurance requirements meet your minimums? Just tell it. 

These tools can flag potentially harmful terms, point out missing critical parts, and even compare contracts against company policy or industry best practices. 

By letting AI do the heavy lifting of contract review, you don’t just save time—you reduce the risk of oversight. CFOs can then focus on the strategic implications of the agreement rather than getting bogged down in tedious line-by-line analysis. 

Cash Flow Forecasting 

Cash flow forecasting is an essential function, but it’s often extremely difficult depending on the complexity of your company. 

AI is especially good at predictive analytics, which can completely change how you approach forecasting. 

AI tools like Anaplan and Fathom can automatically analyze past financial data, incorporate real-time market conditions, and predict future cash flows with fairly high accuracy. 

The forecasts they create take into account a broader set of variables than traditional forecasting methods, helping you identify potential cash flow shortages or surpluses in advance. 

A great example we’ve seen is the use of AI by multinational retailer Zara. Using AI-driven forecasting tools, they managed to optimize their cash flow by predicting inventory demands more accurately, reducing waste and improving profitability. 

By leveraging AI for cash flow forecasting, you’re making data-driven predictions rather than educated guesses. You’ll still need to make tweaks for other things only you will know about in your role. But this level of precision gives you the confidence to make informed decisions around liquidity and capital allocation. 

Expense Management 

Tracking, approving, and reconciling expenses manually is tedious and prone to human error. AI can automate and streamline the entire expense management process. 

Tools like Expensify can automatically categorize expenses, flag policy violations, and even identify potential fraud in real time. 

These tools scan receipts, match them against corporate policies, and notify both the submitter and approver if there’s an issue. 

Most companies have been using these tools for years. Surprisingly, we still encounter some colleagues that don't. Please don’t let yourself become this out of tune. 

Expensify has helped companies like Uber streamline their global expense reporting, saving them hundreds of hours in manual reconciliation and approval processes each year. 

This means you no longer have to micromanage every expense submission. Expensify (or one of the other widely available tools) keeps everything in line with company policy, while also ensuring compliance, accuracy, and timely approvals. 

Risk Management 

We all need to proactively identify and manage financial risks. Those risks could be related to liquidity, vendor reliability, internal fraud, or any number of other areas. 

AI excels in predictive risk management due to its ability to process large datasets, recognize patterns, and flag anomalies. 

Several IT tools that do this are Riskified or Onfido. They use AI to monitor financial data, market movements, and even external factors like geopolitical events to predict potential risks. 

These tools can sit on top of your ERP and see if, for example, certain supplier transactions appear unusual or if there’s a sudden change in customer payment behavior. They will then flag these as risks for further investigation. 

AI can help you stay ahead of potential issues by having a proactive rather than reactive approach to risk. 

Scheduling Meetings 

If you are anything like us, managing the calendar can at times feel like a full-time job. Instead of emailing back and forth on meeting times, tools like x.ai or Clara can automate the entire process for you. 

They can respond to meeting requests, check availability across different calendars, and even find the best times for everyone involved. They can also take into account preferences for time zones, deadlines, and travel schedules. 

With AI handling your scheduling, you’ll eliminate wasting time on coordinating logistics, allowing you to focus on more critical tasks. 

Summarizing Reports and Other Documents 

All of us constantly deal with lengthy financial reports, JV agreements, and PSAs. AI can quickly summarize these documents, pulling out the most relevant information so you don’t have to read every line. 

Simply upload whatever document you want scanned, then AI will provide a concise summary of key points. It can even identify potential action steps or highlight critical data trends within the document. 

In one case, KPMG used an AI-driven tool to reduce the time taken to summarize audit reports by over 40%, helping their team focus on higher-value tasks. 

This not only saves time but also ensures you’re getting the most valuable insights without eating up precious hours of your day scrolling through pages. 

Creating Financial Summaries for Presentations 

One of our favorite things to use AI for is to prepare presentations by automatically generating financial summaries, charts, and visualizations from our raw financial data. 

Google Sheets and Microsoft Power BI can analyze data sets and create visualizations with just a few clicks. Revenue projections, profit margins, or cash flow analysis are all things that AI can help generate into clear, digestible visuals for your presentations. We use ChatGPT to quickly create charts by dropping in data from a spreadsheet. 

Several large financial consulting firms have reported saving up to 60% of the time spent preparing client presentations by using AI-driven financial analysis tools. 

This allows you to focus on strategic narrative rather than having to create slides from scratch. 

Tracking and Summarizing Industry News and Trends 

Staying up to date on industry news is essential for all CFOs. But finding relevant articles, reports, or market data is time-consuming. AI can act as your personalized news aggregator, scanning and summarizing industry news that’s directly relevant to your industry and interests. 

A couple of good tools for this are Feedly or Zest. They can track relevant news sources, financial publications, and industry updates, and then summarize them into daily or weekly briefings. Whatever works best for your schedule. 

You’ll get the key takeaways and trends in a fraction of the time it would take to read multiple articles. 

Another way we like to use these is for highlighting changes in various markets. This gives us the insights needed to intelligently discuss strategy with our CEO and department heads. 

A Warning 

As the financial gatekeepers of our companies, it’s on us to ensure that the decisions we make—whether by human hand or machine—are ones we can live with. 

At this stage of AI development, you need to make sure you are using some common sense. Don’t upload data or put something into an AI tool that you wouldn't want out there. It’s not yet fully understood where that data can end up or who could use it. 

So, how do we, as CFOs, navigate this new AI-driven world? Here are a few rules to live by: 

Question Everything - Just because the algorithm recommends something doesn’t mean it’s the best course of action. Ask yourself...does this decision pass the smell test? Would I do this if AI wasn’t involved? 

Use AI as a Tool, not a Crutch - AI is a powerful tool, but it’s not a replacement for human judgment. Use it to support your decisions, not make them for you. 

Conclusion 

Look, AI isn’t going anywhere, and as CFOs, we’d be fools not to use it. It can save time, cut costs, and give us insights that no human could ever process on their own. 

AI isn’t just for Silicon Valley startups or massive corporations with multimillion-dollar tech budgets. It’s for CFOs...today. The role of a CFO has dramatically evolved from being a financial steward to a strategic business leader. And AI is the tool that can make a CFO not just good at their job but exceptional. 

AI isn’t just about fancy algorithms or automated processes; it’s about working smarter, learning faster, and executing better. The days of spending hours on repetitive tasks or wading through financial jargon are over. With AI, CFOs can now leverage tools that allow them to understand complicated subjects on the fly, reduce inefficiencies, and power up their company’s performance. 

AI is ready to tackle these responsibilities and many others today, freeing you up to focus on strategy, innovation, and growth. 

Whether it's handling expense reports, summarizing financial documents, or scheduling your next meeting, let AI be your most valuable assistant—right now, not just in the future. 

Next Week

In next week’s letter, we’ll discuss debt financing through banks and other lenders such as the life insurance companies. We’ll talk about why you would use each channel, the pros and cons of each, and how to handle thorny subjects such as profitability and debt loads.